Contributors’ Notes, Vol. 34, #1

AARON BAKER’s first collection of poems, Mission Work (Houghton Mifflin, 2008), won the Bakeless Literary Prize in Poetry and the 2009 Glasgow/Shenandoah Prize for Emerging Writers. He is an Assistant Professor in the Creative Writing program at Loyola University Chicago.

HILAIRE BELLOC (1870–1953), born in France, was a prolific English writer of essays, travel books, history, biography, works of Roman Catholic and conservative polemic, light verse, and fiction. His books for children include The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts (1896) and Cautionary Tales (1941), and his essays were collected in such volumes as On Nothing (1908) and On Everything (1909). Other books include The Path to Rome (1902), Places (1942), and History of England (1925–27), as well as biographies of Robespierre, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, and others.

REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS is a husband and father of two sons. The author of the memoir A Question of Freedom (Avery/Penguin 2009) and the collection of poetry titled Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), Betts has been awarded fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, the Open Society Institute, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Warren Wilson College. As a poet, essayist, and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice, Betts writes and lectures frequently about the impact of mass incarceration on American society.

YVES BONNEFOY, often acclaimed as France’s greatest living poet, has published eight major collections of verse, several books of tales, and numerous studies of literature and art. He succeeded Roland Barthes in the Chair of Comparative Poetics at the Collège de France. His work has been translated into scores of languages, and he himself is also a celebrated translator of Shakespeare, Yeats, Keats, and Leopardi. Most recently, he has added the European Prize for Poetry of 2006 and the Kafka Prize for 2007 to his list of honors. He lives in Paris.

ITALO CALVINO (1923–1985) was a distinguished Italian novelist and author of such books as Cosmicomics (1965), Invisible Cities (1972), and If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979). He was also an influential literary critic and editor.

IRMA CERESE paints improvised, somewhat abstract landscapes with a geometric foundation. Educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she has produced award-winning work that has been featured extensively in group and solo shows and is in numerous private and corporate collections. Regularly displayed by several New England galleries, including Edgewater Gallery in Middlebury, her work can also be seen at www.ceresearts.com.

KATHLEEN CHAPLIN received a Ph.D. in Victorian literature from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently an Associate Professor of English at a state university in Massachusetts. She has published academic articles on Victorian fiction and poetry as well as Irish cinema and folklore. Her poems have appeared in Irish Feminist Review and Southword.

MICHAEL COFFEY is co-editorial director at Publishers Weekly and the author of three books of poems. “Sons” is taken from a longer work titled Finishing Ulysses.

KATHRYN DAVIS is the author of seven novels, the most recent of which are Duplex, forthcoming from Graywolf in 2013, and The Thin Place (Little, Brown, 2006). Her other books are Labrador (FSG, 1988), The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf (Knopf, 1993), Hell: A Novel (Ecco, 1998), The Walking Tour (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), and Versailles (Houghton Mifflin, 2002). She has received a Kafka Prize for fiction, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2006, she won a Lannan Foundation Literary Award. She is the senior fiction writer on the faculty of the Writing Program at Washington University in St. Louis.

STEVE DE JARNATT grew up in the small logging town of Longview, Washington, and graduated from Evergreen State College. He recently “broke out” of the film and television industry (writer/director of the indie cult feature Miracle Mile, among many credits) and received an M.F.A. from Antioch University Los Angeles. He was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and will be a Tuition Scholar at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2013. His short fiction has been published or is forthcoming in Santa Monica Review, Zone 3, Meridian, Cincinnati Review, New Stories from the Midwest, and Best American Short Stories 2009.

JOANNE DOMINIQUE DWYER’s first collection of poems, Belle Laide, has recently been published by Sarabande Books (2013). Dwyer reads and writes poems with residents of assisted living facilities who have dementia or Alzheimer’s disease; she lives in northern New Mexico with her partner, seven sheep, a wolf-dog, and a hive of bees.

TARFIA FAIZULLAH is the author of Seam, winner of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award and forthcoming in 2014 from Southern Illinois University Press. Her poems have appeared in Missouri Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and a Ploughshares Cohen Award, as well as scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, and Vermont Studio Center.

DEBORA GREGER’s most recent book of poems, By Herself, was published by Penguin in 2012. At present she is poet-in-residence at the Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville, Florida.

BENJAMIN S. GROSSBERG is the author of Sweet Core Orchard (University of Tampa, 2009), winner of the 2008 Tampa Review Prize and a Lambda Literary Award, and Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath (Ashland Poetry Press, 2007). His third collection, Space Traveler, is forthcoming from the University of Tampa Press. Recent poems can be found in Pleiades, Alaska Quarterly Review, Minnesota Review, the Sun, and Southwest Review.

LISA VAN ORMAN HADLEY lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband, twins, and one-eyed cat. She graduated from the Warren Wilson M.F.A. Program for Writers and was a fellow at the Millay Colony for the Arts. She is currently working on a novel-in-stories, for which she received the Larry Levis Post-Graduate Fellowship and a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Fellowship. Her stories have been published in Knee-Jerk, Opium, and elsewhere.

JOSHUA R. HELMS’s work has appeared in Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Phoebe, Redivider, and Sixth Finch, among other publications. He is the winner of Dzanc Books’ inaugural Poetry Collection Award, and Dzanc will publish his first collection, Machines Like Us, in September 2014.

JAMES HOCH’s poems have appeared in the Washington Post, American Poetry Review, Slate, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. His most recent book is Miscreants (W. W. Norton, 2007). He resides with his wife and sons in Garrison, New York, and teaches at Ramapo College of New Jersey and Sarah Lawrence College.

Maria Hummel is the author of House and Fire, winner of the 2012 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, and the novel Motherland, forthcoming fromCounterpoint in 2014. Her poems and prose have appeared in Poetry, Narrative, Pushcart Prize XXXVI, and The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine.

JOANNE JACOBSON’s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in such publications as Fourth Genre, Seneca Review, BOMB, the Nation, Massachusetts Review, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Journal of the American Medical Association. Her memoir, Hunger Artist: A Suburban Childhood (Bottom Dog Press), came out in 2007. Her study entitled Authority and Alliance in the Letters of Henry Adams (University of Wisconsin Press) was published in 1992. She teaches at Yeshiva University in New York City.

JOSEPH MCELROY is the author of nine novels, including Lookout Cartridge, Women and Men, Plus, and the just-published Cannonball. Also Night Soul and Other Stories and a forthcoming nonfiction book about water.

MARTIN MCLAUGHLIN is the Agnelli-Serena Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Oxford. He is the translator of Italo Calvino’s Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings, Into the War, and Why Read the Classics?, which won the John Florio Prize for translation. He is also co-translator of Calvino’s The Complete Cosmicomics.

ERIC PANKEY’s ninth and tenth books are out in 2013: Trace (Milkweed Editions) and Dismantling the Angel (Free Verse Editions). He is the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University.

ASHLEY HOPE PÉREZ is completing a doctorate in comparative literature at Indiana University. She is also the author of two novels, What Can’t Wait (Carolrhoda Books, 2011) and The Knife and the Butterfly (Carolrhoda Books, 2012).

MELISSA RANGE’s first book of poems, Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press), won the 2010 Walt McDonald Prize in Poetry. Range is the recipient of fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems have recently appeared in 32 Poems, Image, and Subtropics, and have been anthologized in Best American Spiritual Writing. Originally from East Tennessee, she’s finishing up her Ph.D. in English at the University of Missouri.

HOYT ROGERS translates from the French, German, and Spanish. His translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s The Curved Planks was published in 2006 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and his anthology of the poet’s late work, Second Simplicity appeared in 2012 from Yale University Press. In 2014, his translation of Bonnefoy’s The Digamma will be published by Seagull Books. Openwork, his anthology of poems and journal entries by André du Bouchet, prepared in collaboration with Paul Auster, will appear in the Margellos Series at Yale University Press, also in 2014. He divides his time between the Dominican Republic and Italy.

ANDRES ROJAS came to the U.S. from Cuba at age thirteen. He holds an M.F.A. and a J.D. from the University of Florida and currently works for the U.S. Department of the Treasury. His poetry has previously appeared in New England Review and has been featured or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Cossack Review, Massachusetts Review, and other journals.

CHRISTINE SNEED has published stories in past issues of New England Review, The Best American Short Stories 2008, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Glimmer Train, and a number of other publications. Bloomsbury USA published her novel Little Known Facts in February 2013 and reissued her first book, the story collection Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry, in paperback. She teaches for Northwestern University and Pacific University.

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Confluences

After collaborating on the autobiographies of some of the world’s most famous subjects, Peter Knobler turns towards home and writes about memory, music, and his mother. “When I was growing up we had spent many Sunday mornings in our Greenwich Village home listening to Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, the Weavers—records that now sat on her shelves like tablets.”